Why is this article written as if YouTube Premium was a music service? It even calls Spotify and Apple Music competitors. YT Prem for me is about removing ads from the videos I'm watching and from the interface. I don't know how it relates to Spotify or Apple Music or how they're comparable.
Because YT Music is also bundled into the price, and in my opinion it's a decent music streaming service. The big advantage of YT Music is you can find a lot of covers or mashups if you are into that, thanks to Youtube videos.
I also love covers and mashups, even guitar only or bass only (sometimes drums only) covers.
Out of curiosity, how is YT Music different to looking up music on regular youtube? (the latter is what I do). (just spent a couple of minutes googling/llm-ing but can only guess it boils down to 'background play' [hardly a 'feature' IMO] and better operability across multiple devices)
The main difference is that YT Music has different audio tracks than what comes from the videos in many cases (you can hear a difference when you click the "video" link in YT Music app, vs the Audio only). The audio only version is cleaner, and I think is more likely to come from an official source instead of an end user upload. And there are a lot more selection on YT Music (playing full albums, etc).
YT Music has a significantly modified UI. The entire UI is geared towards listening and discovery of music, artists, albums, tracks. If an artist is properly set up in the system, they will have a home page, and a list of their albums, songs, videos displayed. You can touch off a radio station playlist based on that artist, etc.
The difference in content is that many YT videos are simply unavailable inside YT Music, if they are not deemed "music". Therefore you won't be inundated by creators or comedy acts or newscasts, or anything but artists and music.
Music Premium has a feature that allows you to switch seamlessly between an "Audio" and "Video" version of your track. This is not magical but depends on both existing as YouTube entities. They do often match different audio tracks to a corresponding video. And if you're coming through an official "Artist" page then it may be more likely that you discover an official track, but I've never had trouble doing that in YT itself (it's usually a matter of "always only the second link in the search results").
Some artists configure "Playlists" and/or "Releases" tabs in YT proper, but indeed, YT Music is better organized so that you can discover those full albums and use them directly as a play queue.
I am fairly sure that there is no content exclusive to YT Music, only the structured presentation. All their tracks and videos are present and accounted for in YT itself; if you share a link/UUID you'll be able to find it. Conversely, as I mentioned, if it's not "Music" it won't be offered in that app. (This classification may be surprising -- I've found musical tracks and artists that aren't in there, such as the long-form BGM stuff. YT Music is for conventionally short tracks and vids.)
YT Music has music as a first class entity where Youtube itself does not and cannot, so it has features like related music, "radio" playlists based off a track, music recommendations, playlist generation, artist pages with a top 10 song list, and other features you expect from its competitors.
Because Google Music was merged into YouTube. "YouTube Music" is in fact a Spotify competitor. My wife uses it and likes it well enough. It has some dumb restrictions though like children's music can't be added to a playlist as some sort of COPPA something. That makes making "go to sleep" playlists for our infant daughter difficult.
To be entirely fair, they did announce it well in advance and made it really easy to download your entire archive AND they made your music available in your YouTube Music account. I have a bunch of music I bought from Google Play Music and while it sucks that Google killed it, I have to give them credit for making the transition very painless. Desura going down was a lot more abrupt and disruptive.
This describes practically every sunsetted Google product I've used in the past several years. Podcasts, One VPN, transitions with Voice and Duo/Meet, and more. They've all had ample notifications, explanations, and assistance with migration. Moreover, Google's added products which I've embraced, and to date, has never killed anything upon which I relied. In fact, the linchpin apps have improved vastly over time, such as Docs/Sheets, Photos, Calendar; and I love Tasks and Keep now, for all their overlap!
Lacking a mobile contract or a SIM-capable device, I signed up for Voice in 2015, and all the changes since then have been completely understandable, since Voice is a "fake phone" number that can't be allowed on-par with actual mobile services, particularly Google Fi itself. And that's precisely why I needed it 9 years ago.
Youtube Music comes with Premium. I canceled my Spotify account when I joined YT Premium. Honestly it was part of how I justified paying for it (allowed me to "kill two birds" and drop another service).
Many people buy youtube premium because youtube music premium is included in the price and youtube music premium is a direct competitor to spotify and apple music.
Because Youtube Music is included in the price. It has a much wider selection than the competitors since some YouTube videos are included in the music collection.
Yeah, I don't think the author realizes that the main selling point of YouTube Premium is removal of ads. YouTube Music is thrown in as an extra, but I doubt many people (like you) even know it exists.
